The Goose Man
the clothes rack just yesterday, cross my heart, Daniel."
As to hats, dresses, stockings, shoes, laces, and blouses--when it came
to these Dorothea was a stranger to such concepts as measure or modesty.
She wanted to compete with the wives of the rich people whose parties
she attended, and next to whom she sat in the pastry shop or at the
theatre.
She was given free tickets to the theatre and the concerts. But once
when she had told Daniel that the director had sent her a ticket, he
learned from Philippina that she had bought the ticket and paid for it
with her own money. He did not call her to account, but he could not
get the thought out of his mind that she had believed she had deceived
him.
He did not accompany her on her pleasure jaunts; he wanted to work and
not double even the smallest expenditure by going with her. Dorothea had
become accustomed to this. She looked upon his apathy toward the theatre
and his dislike of social distractions as a caprice, a crotchet on his
part. She never considered what he had gone through in the way of
theatricals and concerts; she had completely forgotten what he had
confessed to her in a decisive hour.
When she came home late in the evening with burning cheeks and glowing
eyes, Daniel did not have the courage to give her the advice he felt she
so sorely needed. "Why snatch her from her heaven?" he thought. "She
will become demure and quiet in time; her wild lust for pleasure will
fade and disappear."
He was afraid of her pouting mien, her tears, her perplexed looks, her
defiant running about. But he lacked the words to express himself. He
knew how ineffectual warning and reproach might be and were. Empty
talking back and forth he could not stand, while if he made a really
human remark it found no response. She did not appreciate what he said;
she misunderstood, misinterpreted everything. She laughed, shrugged her
shoulders, pouted, called him an old grouch, or cooed like a dove. She
did not look at him with real eyes; there was no flow of soul in what
she did.
Gloom filled his heart.
The waste in the household affairs became worse and worse from week to
week. Daniel would have felt like a corner grocer if he had never let
her know how much he had saved, or had given her less than she asked
for. And so his money was soon all gone. Dorothea troubled herself very
little about the economic side of their married life. She told
Philippina what to do, and fell into a rage if her orders were not
promptly obeyed.
"It's too dull for her here. My God, such a young woman!" said
Philippina to Daniel with simulated regret. "She wants to have a good
time; she wants to enjoy her life. And you can't blame her."
Philippina was the mistress of the house. She went to the market, paid
the bills, superintended the cook and the washwoman, and rejoiced with
exceeding great and fiendish joy when she saw how rapidly everything was
going downhill, downhill irresistibly and as sure as your life.
VIII
As the time approached for Dorothea's confinement she very rarely left
the house. She would lie in bed until about eleven o'clock, when she
would get up, dress, comb her hair, go through her wardrobe, and write
letters.
She carried on a most elaborate correspondence; those who received her
letters praised her amusing style.
After luncheon she would go back to bed; and late in the afternoon her
visitors came in, not merely women but all sorts of young men. It often
happened that Daniel did not even know the names of the people. He would
withdraw to the room Eleanore had formerly occupied, and from which he
could hear laughter and loud talk resounding through the hall.
By evening Dorothea was tired. She would sit in the rocking chair and
read the newspaper, or the _Wiener Mode_, generally not in the best of
humour.
Daniel confidently believed that all this would change for the better as
soon as the child had been born; he believed that the feeling of a
mother and the duties of a mother would have a broadening and subduing
effect on her.
Late in the autumn Dorothea gave birth to a boy, who was baptised
Gottfried. She could not do enough by way of showing her affection for
the child; her transports were expressed in the most childish terms; her
display of tenderness was almost excessive.
For six days she nursed the child herself. Then the novelty wore off,
friends told her it would ruin her shape to keep it up, and she quit.
"It makes you stout," she said to Philippina, "and cow's milk is just as
good, if not better."
Philippina opened her mouth and eyes as wide as she could when she saw
Dorothea standing before the mirror, stripped to the hips, studying the
symmetry of her body with a seriousness that no one had ever noticed in
her before.
Dorothea became coldly indifferent toward her child; it seemed that she
had entirely forgotten that she was a mother. The baby slept in the room
with Philippina and Agnes, both of whom cared for it. Its mother was
otherwise engaged.
As if to make up for lost time and to indemnify herself for the
suffering and general inconvenience to which she had been put in the
last few months, Dorothea rushed with mad greediness into new pleasures
and strange diversions. Soon however she found herself embarrassed from
a lack of funds. Daniel told her, kindly but firmly, that the salaries
he was drawing as organist and teacher were just barely enough to keep
the house going, and that he was curtailing his own personal needs as
much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or
diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. "We are not
peasants," he said, "and that we are not living from the mercy of chance
is a flaw in me rather than in my favour."
"You old pinch-penny!" said Dorothea. Ugly wrinkles appeared on her
brow. "If you had not made me disgusted with my art, I might have been
able to make a little money too," she added.
He looked down at the floor in complete silence. She however began
thinking about ways and means of getting her hands on money. "Uncle
Carovius might help me," she thought. She took to visiting her father
more frequently, and every time she came she would stand out in the hall
for a while hoping to see Herr Carovius. One day he appeared. She wanted
to speak to him, smile at him, win him over. But one look from that
face, filled with petrified and ineradicable rage, showed her that any
attempt to approach the old man and get him in a friendly frame of mind
would be fruitless.
On the way home she chanced to meet the actor Edmund Hahn. She had not
seen him since she had been married. The actor seemed tremendously
pleased to see her. They walked along together, engaged in a zealous
conversation, talking at first loudly and then gently.
IX
The day Dorothea got married, Herr Carovius had gone to his lawyer to
have the will he had drawn up the night before attested to. He had
bequeathed his entire fortune, including his home and the furniture, to
an institution to be erected after his death for the benefit of orphans
of noble birth. Baron Eberhard von Auffenberg had been named as first
director of the institution and sole executor of his will.
Herr Carovius refused to have anything more to do with music. He had a
leather cover made for his long, narrow grand piano, and enshrouded in
this, the instrument resembled a stuffed animal. He looked back on his
passion for music as one of the aberrations of his youth, though he
realised that he was chastising his spirit till it hurt when he took
this attitude.
The method he employed to keep from having nothing to do was
characteristic of the man: he went through all the books of his library
looking for typographical errors. He spent hours every day at this work;
he read the scientific treatises and the volumes of pure literature with
his attention fixed on individual letters. When, after infinite search,
he discovered a word that had been misspelled, or a grammatical slip, he
felt like a fisherman who, after waiting long and patiently, finally
sees a fish dangling on the hook.
Otherwise he was thoroughly unhappy. The beautiful evenness of his hair
on the back of his neck had been transformed into a shaggy wilderness.
He could be seen going along the street in a suit of clothes that was
peppered with spots, while his Calabrian hat resembled a war tent that
has gone through a number of major offensives.
He had again taken to frequenting the Paradise Cafe two or three times a
week, not exactly to surrender himself to mournful memories, but because
the coffee there cost twenty pfennigs, whereas the more modern cafes
were charging twenty-five. His dinner consisted of a pot of coffee and a
few rolls.
It came about that old Jordan likewise began to frequent the Paradise.
For a long while the two men would go there, sit down at their chosen
tables, and study each other at a distance. Finally the day came when
they sat down together; then it became a custom for them to take their
places at the same table, one back in the corner by the stove, where a
quiet comradeship developed between them. It was rare that their
conversation went beyond external platitudes.
Herr Carovius acted as though he were merely enduring old Jordan. But he
never really became absorbed in his newspaper until the old man had come
and sat down at the table with him, greeting him with marked respect as
he did so. Jordan, however, did not conceal his delight when, on
entering the cafe and casting his eyes around the room, they at last
fell on Herr Carovius. While he sipped his coffee, he never took them
off the wicked face of his _vis-a-vis_.
X
Philippina became Dorothea's confidential friend.
At first it was nothing more than Dorothea's desire to gossip that drew
her to Philippina. Later she fell into the habit of telling her
everything she knew. She felt no need of keeping any secret from
Philippina, the inexplicable. The calm attentiveness with which
Philippina listened to her flattered her, and left her without a vestige
of suspicion. She felt that Philippina was too stupid and uncultivated
to view her activities in perspective or pass judgment on them.
She liked to conjure up seductive pictures before the old maid's
imagination; for she loved to hear Philippina abuse the male of the
species. If some bold plan were maturing in her mind, she would tell
Philippina about it just as if it had already been executed. In this way
she tested the possibility of really carrying out her designs, and
procured for herself a foretaste of what was to follow.
It was chiefly Philippina's utter ugliness that made her trust her. Such
a homely creature was in her eyes not a woman, hardly a human being of
either sex; and with her she felt she could talk just as much as she
pleased, and say anything that came into her head. And since Philippina
never spoke of Daniel in any but a derogatory and spiteful tone,
Dorothea felt perfectly safe on that ground.
She would come into the kitchen, and sit down on a bench and talk: about
a silk dress she had seen for sale; about the fine compliments Court
Councillor Finkeldey had paid her; about the love affairs of these and
the divorce proceedings of those; about Frau Feistelmann's pearls,
remarking that she would give ten years of her life if she also had such
pearls. In fact, the word she used most frequently was "also." She
trembled and shook from head to foot with desires and wishes, low-minded
unrest and lusts that flourish in the dark.
Often she would tell stories of her life in Munich. She told how she
once spent a night with an artist in his studio, just for fun; and how